The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Friday, May 16, 2014

South China Sea: How Many Battalions Does the Passive Voice Have?

And...Island Games: Okinotorishima vs. Johnson South Reef

My Twitter feed contained the following ringing statement:

Claims disputes
pervade maritime Asia. All parties must be prevented from use force/threat
thereof to alter status quo.

To paraphrase Napoleon on the Pope, how many battalions does
the frickin’ passive voice have?

“Must be prevented”.That’s
the problem with the pivot.

The "pivot to Asia" is an idea. It's not a doctrine, like the Monroe Doctrine, the Truman Doctrine, the Eisenhower Doctrine, or the Bush Doctrine, all of which were based on the statement, "If you do X, It'sWar!"(Or, in the case of the immortal Bush doctrine, If you're thinking of doing X, or I think you're thinking of doing X, or if you're not thinking of doing X but I want to bomb you anyway, It's War!)

The pivot expresses the hope that the PRC will mistake a US
preference for an national doctrine, construe the US desire to make mischief
for the PRC in its near beyond as a matter of existential resolve, and do the
United States the courtesy of dignifying Washington’s expressions of
disapproval as a deterrent.

The PRC, on the other hand, has a genuine doctrine: its territorial
integrity is an existential issue.And
it has openly applied it to the South China Sea.

I might point out that the PRC tried to make its South China
Sea priorities a matter of engagement with the United States (remember the “core
interest” kerfuffle?), but Hillary Clinton instead, oh so cleverly, turned the
issue on its head as a matter of Chinese aggression, and made support for the
PRC’s South China Sea adversaries into the keystone of the pivot.

So those chickens have come home to roost.As the United States committed fully to the
pivot architecture, the PRC has decided to flout the US deterrent by moving the
HYSY 981 into Vietnam’s claimed EEZ and so far the US response has been…extremely
muted.

I expect that President Obama is loath to pile a PRC crisis
on top of his Russian crisis.

I also suspect that the United States did not have a riposte
ready in its well-financed, exhaustively think-tanked China strategy for a PRC
provocation like this.

Perhaps the US was lazily assuming that the PRC, its
military completely overmatched by the United States’, would never have the
gumption to test the US deterrent.

In any case, there it is.

Undoubtedly, the US foreign policy apparatus is working up a
portfolio of appropriately muscular options for President Obama, all the way
from blasting the HYSY 981 out of the water to sailing the USSN Ronald Reagan et.
al. through the Chinese flotilla, to joint patrols with the Philippine
navy/coast guard, to drawing a red line in the waters of the South China Sea…

Anyway, I think the PRC is determined to show that its
determination and staying power exceed that of the United States in South China
Sea jostling up to the point of military confrontation.

And maybe even including war, if a feisty op-ed in
Global Times is taken at face value:

It's a demanding and
risky job to let other countries get used to China's rise and treat China as a
major power. Vietnam and the Philippines, which haven't updated their knowledge
about China, still cherish the illusion that China can simply be forced back by
pressure.

China's interests are
beyond the South China Sea. It must strike a balance between securing its
territorial waters and maintaining a vibrant growth trend.

China faces a dilemma with its growing power. On the one hand, it will be
confronted by neighbors like Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan, and other
stakeholders like the US if it makes use of its power.

On the other, if China conceals its power, its determination to safeguard
territorial integrity will be underestimated, which would further foster the
unscrupulousness of countries like Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan.

…

China has taken the
first assertive step in securing its territorial integrity in the South China
Sea, and in the meantime faces strong protests from Hanoi and Manila, and
obvious bias from the US. China's diplomatic risks are rising, but these are
the costs that have to be borne as China becomes more powerful.

The South China Sea disputes should be settled in a peaceful manner, but that
doesn't mean China can't resort to non-peaceful measures in the face of
provocation from Vietnam and the Philippines. Many people believe that a forced
war would convince some countries of China's sincerely peaceful intentions, but
it is also highly likely that China's strategy would face more uncertainties.

There are some off ramps for the current crisis short of a
direct mano-a-mano confrontation between the US and the PRC.

Vietnam, the United States, et. al. might simply suck it up
and limit themselves to verbal castigation of the PRC until August 15, when the
HYSY 981-zilla is due to lumber off.

Or Vietnam will decide that capitulation is the better part
of valor, heed PRC calls for bilateral talks and, in bad news for the
Philippines, contribute to the further fracturing of the shaky South China Sea anti-PRC
United Front.

I suspect that the PRC has put an attractive pile of
economic carrots on the table together with the HSYS 981 stick, and Vietnam is
currently weighing the psychic benefits of partnership in an anti-Chinese
alliance with the economic benefits that might accrue from expanded PRC trade
and investment.

I think in the medium term, Vietnam will come to the
conclusion that existential, war-worthy interests for the United States are not
identical with those of any other nation in Asia, including Japan, and the most
credible deterrent is one that it is in the control of Vietnam.

I’m sure France would be interested in obliging Vietnam with
the sale of a few ship (and platform)-killing missiles that might make the PRC
think twice before it engages in tomfoolery in Vietnam’s offshore near beyond.

And that, I think, is how the PRC’s leadership sees the
endgame playing out.Asian powers become
richer, stronger, and more independent of the United States.And the United States, anxious for regional influence,
eventually comes back to the PRC…

Anyway, moving from the general to the particular, there’s
an apparent PRC building program on Johnson South Reef, a formation that the
Philippines considers inside its 200 nm EEZ.

The Philippines released photos that appear to show a dredge
pumping up sand to expand the above surface area of the reef.The Philippine foreign ministry accused the
PRC of violating the stand-still agreement negotiated with ASEAN.According to AFP, the PRC for its part
acknowledged work was going on but it was just “renovation” of facilities for
Chinese troops stationed on the reef, presumably claiming that its work therefore
doesn’t violate the standstill agreement.

Interestingly, the PRC had actually established itself at
Johnson South Reef after a skirmish with Vietnam, not the Philippines, in 1988,
at a time when both Vietnam and PRC were both racing to occupy the reef.Vietnam, thanks to its “flying rectangle”—an EEZ
claim only slightly less risible than the Chinese “cow tongue”—claims many of
the islands that are also subject to PRC-Philippine wrangling.

As a reminder to readers of the folly of turning the South
China Sea into an internationalized issue, here is the map of what I call the “salad
bowl” of Spratly sovereignty claims, courtesy of Wikipedia.Remember, EEZs can’t be defined until
sovereignty is agreed—and there is no accepted multi-lateral mechanism for
determining sovereignty.

As to the motive for the Chinese jiggery-pokery on Johnson
Second Reef, the Philippines raised the specter of airfield construction and,
by implication, enhancement of the PRC military threat to adjacent Philippine
claims.

It is apparently unlikely that an airfield that could
contribute significantly to the PRC military presence in the islands could be
constructed on the reef.

For a more likely explanation of PRC intentions, let us turn
to…Okinotorishima Island!

Long story short, Okoritorishima Island was the occasion for
an exercise of EEZ aggrandizement by Japan, abetted for some reason by the
complaisant solons of the UNCLOS Commission on the Limits of the Continental
Shelf.

The PRC has cast a stern and disapproving eye on the Okinotorishima
exercise.The information and illustrations
below, unless otherwise acknowledged, are from a presentation by Julia Xue of
Qingdao Ocean University at a conference in Washington, D.C. in 2010.

The two Okinotorishima islands, 1700 km SSW from Tokyo and a
good 700 km from the nearest inhabited Japanese territory, were not impressive
in their original form.One lump was 4.7
meters across, the other 2.6 meters across.And they were clearly eroding and not long for the above-surface world
unless steps were taken:

Through an intensive application of resources i.e. $600
million dollars to build a protective cofferdam around the islands, sheath the
islands itself, and construct a platform, the rocks were transformed into this:

Here is Shintaro Ishihara, everybody’s favorite advocate of
island restraint, standing on one of the islands of Okinotorishima.

And kneeling on the island to kiss the sacred territory:

Except he’s not standing/kneeling/kissing the rocks
themselves.He’s standing on an
erosion-prevention cap over the rocks.

Here’s the rocks, under the cap:

And Japan, over the objections of the PRC and South Korea,
proclaimed a radial 200 nm EEZ around Okinotorishima.The Japanese government leaned on the
argument that, although UNCLOS denied an EEZ to “rocks” that could not support “human
habitation or economic life on their own”, Okinotorishima was not “rocks”; it
was an “island” that could not support “human habitation or economic life on
their own,” UNCLOS was talking about a totally different thing, so problem
solved.

Anyway, Japan took this less-than-impressive,
less-than-natural feature to UNCLOS and was able to get an extension of the
Japanese continental shelf to Okinotorishima Island.(Thanks to the creation of the Okinotorishima
EEZ, the “Shikoku Basin Region” was a non-EEZ zone surrounded on all sides by
Japanese EEZs, so I imagine that UNCLOS committee was relatively cavalier in
assigning it to Japan).

And Japan further used Okinotorishima to apply to UNCLOS for
another southward extension of its continental shelf to the boundaries of Palau
(the application is pending).

An article for a Japanese think tank, the Ocean Policy
Research Council, by an admiral in the JMSDF declared that Japan’s EEZ grab was
related to security: that it wanted to be able to “constrain” Chinese military
vessels.
If this was indeed the intent, that dog may no longer hunt.The United States has strongly asserted its
right to send military vessels through the PRC EEZ to track PLAN submarines, and
the PRC has apparently grudgingly accepted that point, so it would be difficult
to exclude PRC military vessels from the Okinotorishima EEZ.On the other hand, if PRC decides to get
chesty again about US military vessels operating inside its EEZ, Japan’s
massive EEZ holdings could be used to bottle up the Chinese inside the
oft-invoked “first island chain”.

As to where this all leads, it appears that UNCLOS has been
rather feckless in alienating ocean areas on the basis of dubious exercises in “islandisation”.It is difficult—though of course not
impossible—for China’s adversaries to criticize the PRC for adopting the
Japanese precedent of jacking up an island and claiming an EEZ.

Perhaps at Johnson Second Reef, the PRC is cloning the
Japanese “lilypad” approach displayed at Okinotorishima, not for military
purposes but to assert rights to an EEZ.

As to the motive for doing this in the cluttered confines of
the South China Sea, I would speculate that the PRC is looking forward to the
day when it finally retreats from the anachronistic and ahistoric “nine dash
line” (which has never even been surveyed; it’s literally just lines drawn on a
map), turns on a dime, and presents a portfolio of territorial sovereignty and
EEZ claims…that pretty much cover the same area.